Getting an FBI background check when you live outside the US

If you're already in Korea and your E-2 paperwork needs a fresh FBI check, the first thing to know is what you can't do. The US Embassy cannot take your fingerprints for FBI background check purposes. So a trip to the embassy in Seoul won't solve this one. You need fingerprints taken somewhere else, then submitted to the FBI directly or through a company the FBI has approved to handle submissions electronically.

What the FBI actually requires. You submit a completed request form, a set of fingerprints on an FD-258 or FD-1164 card, and an $18 fee to the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Division. That's the whole application. The complexity, for people living abroad, is entirely about how you get prints taken and how you get the card to West Virginia.

Two routes, very different waits.

A channeler is simply a private company the FBI has authorized to send fingerprint data electronically instead of as an ink card in an envelope. Some are set up to send you a mail-in kit anywhere in the world, take your prints at a local station, and scan the card back once it arrives.

If you mail it yourself. Completed cards go to the FBI's CJIS Division in Clarksburg, West Virginia, at 1000 Custer Hollow Road, Clarksburg, WV 26306. One detail that trips people up from overseas: for mail submissions, the FBI accepts only a certified check or money order made payable to the Treasury of the United States. Getting a US-dollar money order while living in Korea is its own small errand, which is one reason many teachers in our network use a channeler instead and just pay by card.

Don't expect a tracking number or a rush option. The FBI does not offer expedited handling for any submission type, and mailed requests are processed in the date order received. And once it's in the queue, the FBI does not provide a status tracking system for individual Identity History Summary requests. That's the one genuinely annoying part of this whole process: you send it off and then you wait, with no portal to check and no way to pay for faster handling.

After you have it. The document the FBI sends back isn't the end of the paperwork chain. Most Korean visa offices want it apostilled, and that's a separate request to the US Department of State, not the FBI. That's a different process with its own timing, worth planning for separately once your Identity History Summary is in hand.

So the order that actually works, start to finish:

1. Confirm with your consulate or your placement coordinator whether your situation needs a brand-new FBI check or whether an existing one is still valid.
2. Decide: mail-in with an ink card, or an FBI-approved channeler with electronic submission.
3. Get fingerprinted, at a local police station if you're mailing it yourself, or through whatever method your channeler sets up.
4. Submit, pay the $18 fee, and wait.
5. Once the summary arrives, start the apostille step.

Build in real time before you need the document for anything. A channeler measured in days is a very different timeline than a mailed card measured in weeks, and from Korea you're adding international shipping to either one.